I can't decide between mullvad and private internet access. Any suggestions?
Mullvad is a low-profile company based in Sweden (strong guarantees for privacy) where you can even sign up by sending cash in an envelope. It doesn't get more anonymous than that.
On the technical side, I've been using Mullvad since probably 2012 or something like that, and lately just their Wireguard implementation. Always have had good performance and never received any complaints, even though I have used it for torrenting and bunch of grey-area stuff.
Edit: I see now the author has even highlighted PIA as their "top pick", which for me compromises the integrity of this list. PIA most likely paid the author to add that for them.
Disclaimer: I don't work at Proton and I have no idea if they actually do care about privacy, they at least say it.
What do you mean? Sweden is not at all a strong guarantee of privacy by EU standards.
Did you mean Switzerland perhaps?
[1]: https://mullvad.net/
One has stellar organic reputation and accepts anonymous registrations and payments (cryptocurrency or cash-in-letter). The other spends serious bank on SEO and paid endorsements from "reviewers" and has been acquired by one of the sketchiest owners in the industry. They have a strong track-record of paying to get on top of VPN lists.
If privacy is a concern, I wouldn't touch anything under Kape Technologies with a pole and after the acquisition last year, I don't see why anyone would become a customer of PIA.
Unless you're purely interested in tunneling your warez and nothing else, in which case I guess NordVPN is a decent choice (I hold them sus and would recommend against them for general use but they do provide great bandwidth-per-buck). You could always do split-tunneling and route your torrents through one place and HTTP(S) through another, for example.
https://digital-lab-wp.consumerreports.org/wp-content/upload... (PDF)
> Although Mullvad, IVPN, and Mozilla VPN—in that order—rose to the top, there are still improvements that can be made.
> Of the 16 VPNs we analyzed, Mullvad, PIA, IVPN, and Mozilla VPN (which runs on Mullvad’s servers)—in that order—were among the highest ranked in both privacy and security. However, PIA has never had a public third-party security audit. Additionally, in our opinion, only IVPN, Mozilla VPN, and Mullvad—along with one other VPN (TunnelBear)—accurately represent their services and technology without any broad, sweeping, or potentially misleading statements.
Side note: All these ads for VPN services you see now really makes it seem like you should use a VPN. Do most people need a VPN? You trade off an ISP snooping to a VPN provider snooping. Here in the UK, ISPs can't sell my browsing data, and are more regulated than private companies, so maybe that influences my opinion here.
Well, you trade off the possibility of a VPN provider snooping even though they claim not to for the 100% definite snooping that you know for a fact is happening with an ISP. And even if you get a VPN that snoops, wouldn't you rather have some random small company doing that snooping than, say, Comcast?
I've had a subscription with them for a couple months, but I recently found out they intercept DNS requests[0] (supposedly to prevent against "DNS leaks"[1]).
For the "keeping me private while torrenting" use case, Mullvad is probably fine, but personally I'm planning to move back to a private VPS for tunneling out of my local ISP.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/mullvadvpn/comments/invjgp/how_and_...